"The Poetics of the Open Work"

I was really interested in Umberto Eco’s “The Poetics of the Open Work” as a means of individual interpretation through participation. The several musical compositions he lists at the beginning of this essay allow an individual to do just that. These works are not fixed and handed over to an orchestra to perform just as they are written (which also allows for participation and interpretation, but only through listening.) The pieces by Pousseur and Stockhausen deliberately allow for individual participation through not only listening, but by, in a sense recreating an entirely new piece of music through the chance and randomness of choice by the individual performer. These pieces are made solely for the individual to interpret and narrate (narrate in the fact they are choosing and making decisions about the sequences of notes) by allowing multiple performers to come up with unique variations of the same piece based on their individual capacity. This idea of “unique capacity” that Eco brings up is similar to Charles Peirce’s “capacity for experience” in that the level of participation, interpretation, and reaction will vary based on an individuals own degree of personal experience.

Eco describes a work of art as being both closed and open, as it is a fixed piece that is it for the most part unchanging, while it is also open because of the work’s ability to generate interpretations unique to each viewer. Eco writes, “A work of art, therefore, is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time is constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.” (22) More simply put, art represents a completed physical form, but is subjective and infinite based on variations of viewer interpretation.

Eco then goes on a trip through history, describing how viewers and readers alike are pre-conditioned or influenced in their interpretations by certain societal, religious, and political factors. Contemporary culture therefore changes individual interpretation. I think that these “contemporary” open works which Eco describes in the beginning is taking into account that individual interpretation is in a way bias, and not “open,” and are trying to encourage an uninhibited, free participation by giving individuals a chance to choose. (This is similar to automatic writing.) Eco quotes, Mallarme, in a phrase that I particularly like because of its romantic notion of an individual’s innate inclination to discover for themselves meaning through inner-contemplation and thinking, and through any type of artistic form, be it literary, musical, or art, by defining and prescribing exactly what an individual is suppose to think and feel, is depriving them of their own aesthetic experience, fulfillment, and satisfaction of curiosity: “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest. . . there is the dream.” (27) This quotation seems to embody the very essense of the title of Eco's essay, "The Poetics of the Open Work."